Theatre and Culture from Scotland, starring The List's Theatre Editor, his performance persona and occasional guest stars. Experimental writings, cod-academic critiques and all his opinions, stolen or original.

Friday, 2 January 2015

Ontology of comics: the bitter end

It is not that I am bored with Meskin's ontology of comics - I keep getting distracted by things that make me angry. Like that Jezebel website. Today, it has an article about this woman who didn't die when she got hit by a car because she was wearing a tight dress. Look, I'm not saying that commenting on media representations of women is a waste of time, or that the slightly sarcastic comments of the writer don't suggest a residual, sly feminist humour, but it's all getting a bit too 'First World Problem' for me. I know that the press is full of dumb-asses who don't know what is a story and what is a thinly concealed excuse for printing a picture of a curvy babe... and I keep getting these adverts for Russian women in my area who want to date older men whenever I get click-baited...Sorry.Finally, when do we have an authentic instance of a comic? I argue that comics (even digital comics) are best understood as autographic—they admit of referential forgery and direct transcription will not suffice to produce an authentic instance of a comic.

This is all about whether it is possible to forge a copy of a comic: to make a version of the comic that refers to a source, presents itself as being the source, and can get sold (I presume) for the same price as the source, if you sucker an expert or a thirteen year old who really needs that Fantastic Force #12.

Apparently, you can.

Okay, to sum up, here's how a comic exists, according to me via remorseless theft of Mekin's source article.

A comic exists as a multiple - simultaneous copies exist, all of which count as 'the event'.

There is a source, a manuscript, against which each multiple can be judged.

It is possible to forge a copy of the multiple.

I've lost the best bit of Meskin, though: his encoding style of replication offers a potential conflict with the possibility of it being forged (if no manuscript exists, how can it be forged et c).

All sorts of fun stuff here, but I found this thing about countering sexist arguments about the representation of women in comics (and it has that add for Russian women, too)....

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